Tuesday, December 07, 2010

A Nice Dish of Braughwham.

If the bread left over yesterday from your experiment with ‘bust-coat’ is now cool and less appetising, you could make yourself a nice dish of ‘braughwham’ for your supper - if we can work out what that is, of course. Using your leftovers from yesterday's recipe would not be quite authentic, as braughwham is supposed to be made from clap-bread, not wheaten bread, but why not give it a try anyway?

According to the source that introduced us to ‘bust-coat’ - Nathan Bailey’s Etymological Dictionary (1675) – ‘braughwham’ is “A dish made of Cheese, Eggs, Clap Bread and Butter, boiled together.” Sometimes dictionary definitions are not quite definite enough for clarity, and I remain unsure as to the exact nature of ‘braughwham.’ Is it a sort of savoury bread custard? A cheesy bread pudding in a cloth? Some form of coarse scrambled eggs? Or maybe a dish of dumplings? It sounds like a dish guaranteed to continue to bust you out of your coat, however.

I give you a basic recipe for bread dumplings (‘light’ dumplings, too, if there is such a thing), to get your creative juices flowing. This recipe begins with the raw dough, so as it turns out it will not help you use up your leftover bust-coat bread – sorry about that, but I am moving house in two days and have run out of recipe-search time!

Light Bread Dumplings.
Take as much lightened dough as will make a loaf of bread. Work into it half a pound of stemmed raisins tie it up in a cloth, and boil it an hour and a half.Domestic Cookery, Elizabeth Lea, 1859